For the last number of weeks, about a month now, aside from my early dawn journaling, I’ve not been moved to write. The last post was a few days before the box office murder of George Floyd. If all the world is a stage then we are living in a snuff film. A week or so ago, I spoke with a fellow artist about creating work dealing with the current events. His statement to me, “What can I create?! All I feel is rage right now.” That became his piece, and perhaps will lend toward his peace. The work is in two subdued shades of green, a most calming color on the human eye. It is eerily relaxing. Reminiscent of nature. The blocky letters are spaced within the space. This work to me, is a groundswell, a restrained explosion of epic proportions. It’s charged. That is where I am at the moment. Amid throes of protests and its peripherals is a releasing of pent up energy on the heels of the corona scare. My hope and prayer is that it is more than a reaction, more than a fit of rage, a tantrum, a populist cooption, more than a rising emotional wave that will crest and settle into a waning tide only having made noise crashing against a shore, and washing back out to see in the distance, faded shades of dream once again deferred.
My prayer and action will be for us to know what justice looks like; when we look in the mirror. Justice to me is to want for another, the basic rights, freedoms, and privileges that I desire for myself. To look into the face of one who you assume to be the least like you and to see yourself, your son, your daughter, your mother or father, even a reflection of your God. Would this change how you see, how you perceive another as so different and deserving of any less than you?
The front and center murder of George Floyd or Ahmaud Arbery is by no means an anomaly on the historical screen of American cinema. It’s a festering outbreak of an American cancer; a debilitating malady her founding fathers and their seed refused and refuse to acknowledge or chooses to ignore. It will continue to eat away at the heart and soul until a most certain demise ensues.. It is deeply imbedded in the psyche of the American way of life. So much so that it may not even be noticed on the daily by the benefactors beneath the pomp and circumstance of perceived progress. Perchance this latest outbreak will trigger a turn of events, the catalyst for the paradigm shift in the conscious of the American psyche. Hopefully it is the Renting of the veil. The veil of American illusion also known as…to be continued…
Notes of A Native Son 